The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald

  “They did your dirty work for you.”

  “That’s what I mean, I’m the brains. They’d crucify their g-grandmothers for a stick of H. Let the k-kill-crazy bastards stay here and take the rap. I’ll send them a postcard from South America.”

  Her blue gaze jumped like a gas flame at his face. “You mean we will, don’t you?”

  “We will what?”

  “Send them a postcard from South America, stupid. We’re going there together, aren’t we?”

  “Not if you g-go on calling me stupid.”

  “What in hell is this, Larry?”

  “You keep a civil tongue, talking to me.”

  “Oh, sure. The mastermind. The big brain.” She snarled at him: “Let me see those tickets.”

  “They’re not here. I don’t have them.”

  “You went down to the Grove to pick them up. Didn’t Adelaide buy them?”

  “Of course she did. They’re in my car. Everything’s in my car.”

  “How do I know there are two tickets?”

  “I’m telling you. Do you think I’d stand you up at this late date?”

  “If you thought you could get away with it. Only you can’t.”

  It resembled a conversation on a lower floor of merry hell, where two dead souls re-enacted a meaningless scene forever. It was the meaninglessness that made it hell. I dug deep for the most meaningful words I could find. “Listen to me. Hilda. Ferguson’s very fond of you, he’s ready to forgive you. Why throw yourself away on thieves and psychos? You still have some kind of future if you’ll take it.”

  Gaines moved on me jerkily. His boot soles thumped the floor as if he had poor contact with reality.

  “I’m no psycho, d-dad.” He offered the gun in evidence, leveling it at my middle. “Take it back or I k-kill you now. I’m going to k-kill you anyway. I’d just as soon k-kill you now.”

  Hilda stepped between us. “Let the man speak his piece.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “He’s funny. He gives me kicks.” She was looking at me like a lost soul out of hell.

  “You’ve had your k-kicks.” He smiled at her malignly.

  “What’s on your mind? Are you taking Adelaide with you instead of me? I wouldn’t put it past you, mother lover.”

  One of his sudden rages went through him like a hemorrhage. It drained his face of color. “D-don’t call me that. You want to d-die, too?”

  “Christ, you’re the one that’s kill-crazy. You better give me that gun.”

  “I wouldn’t trust you with it.”

  “Hand it over, little man,” she growled. Her breasts were thrust out under her shirt, aggressive as nose cones.

  “D-don’t give me orders.”

  The gun wavered toward her. She reached for the muzzle. Gaines looked horribly torn, ready to faint. He raised the gun and struck her with it on the side of the head. She went to her knees like a supplicant.

  I stepped around her and hit him in the soft place below his ribs. He opened his mouth to grunt. I smashed it with my right fist. He ran rapidly backward across the room and slammed into the wall on the far side. The gun clacked on the floor and skittered away into shadow.

  I went after Gaines. He didn’t come to meet me. He stayed against the wall, gasping for breath, until I was almost on top of him. Then he moved very quickly. His fist came out from under his windbreaker with a blade projecting upward from it.

  I rushed him and got both hands on the arm behind the fist. We were face to face for an instant, static and straining. Before the instant was over, I knew that I was stronger than he was. The knowledge made me grin.

  He struck and scratched at my grin with his free hand. I concentrated on the wrist behind the knife. I forced it up to the level of my chest, ducked under it, turning, and twisted it with the whole torque of my body. Something gave. The knife fell between us.

  I picked it up, but it did me no great good. The woman was crawling away from the light into the deep shadow. She found the gun and sat on the floor with it. Resting the barrel between her pulled-up knees, she sighted along it and fired.

  The bullet hit my shoulder, turned me, and set me in motion. She fired again, but I felt no second wound. I didn’t need one. I waded to the doorway in the floor’s dissolving surface and fell slack. My head must have struck the door frame. I dropped across the threshold of consciousness.

  chapter 25

  INTO THE LANDSCAPE of a hundred dreams. I was out in the orchard sailing chips in the creek. The rolling hills on the far side supported white cumulus clouds. Above them the sun soared, brightening. It blasted my face with heat. The creek dried up. I covered my eyes. When I looked up again, the sun was red; the hills were black as lava, except where barns were burning. The apples turned black on the trees and dropped in the black grass. I went into the house to tell my father. “He’s dead,” said an old brown woman I didn’t know. “They flit by the window, and what’s become of Sally?”

  The thought of her took hold of me and jerked me out of dream country. I felt floor against my face, hot air on the back of my neck.

  “There’s a Santa Ana blowing,” I said. “Somebody left a window open.”

  No one paid any attention. I lifted my head and saw the firelight dancing on the wall. It was a pretty sight, but it annoyed me. With the desert wind blowing, it made no sense to build up the dying fire.

  I rolled over and sat up. One side of the room was alive with flames. They fluttered toward me like ribbons in a fan draft, and toward the woman lying on the floor. I thought with something approaching awe that Gaines had included her in his plan of destruction. Her clothes were disarrayed as though she had put up a struggle. A blue bruise spread from her temple across one eye.

  I started to crawl toward her, and discovered that my right arm wasn’t working. Before I reached her, a tongue of flame licked at her outflung hand. Her fingers curled up away from it. Her whole body stirred sluggishly. She wasn’t dead.

  Which meant I had to get her out of there. I scrambled to my feet. Fire flapped like flags around her. I twisted my good hand in the tails of her shirt and heaved. The shirt tore and came away from her body.

  She was becoming very important to me. Holding my breath against the heat, I caught hold of her limp wrist and dragged her into the hallway. It was like a wind tunnel. Air poured through the open front door. I pulled her out into the blessed night.

  The fire was beginning to sing and surge behind me. In no time at all it would be a roaring furnace. I looked for my car. It was gone. I maneuvered the unconscious woman to the edge of the veranda, hauled her up to a sitting position, crouched in front of her, and lifted her by the wrist across my good shoulder.

  Somehow I got my knees straightened out under her weight, and started down the driveway. I had a fixed idea that I must get her as far as the road, in case the trees caught fire. It wasn’t likely, after the winter rains, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly.

  The trees on either side swayed mystically in the moonlight. I swayed not so mystically. My faint and hunchbacked shadow mocked my movements. The soft burden on my back seemed to increase with each step I took. Then it began to slip.

  Before she slithered from my grasp entirely, I went to my knees at the side of the drive and let her down carefully. We were still under trees, a hundred feet short of the gate, but this would have to do. She lay like a marble torso fallen from its plinth, waiting for someone to lift her back into place.

  I sat down heavily in the weeds beside her. I couldn’t have been so very far gone, because her bare breasts disturbed me. I got my jacket off and covered her with it.

  The right side of my shirt was dark and clammy. I felt the dark goo with my fingers and only then recalled the shocking image of Hilda sighting across her knees and firing. With my left forefinger I found the hole she had made, just under my collarbone. It was wet and warm. I balled my handkerchief and held it against the wound.

  The woman whimpered. Faint coppe
ry lights were moving on her face. I thought for an instant she was coming to, then realized it was the fire’s reflection. The upstairs windows of the house were rectangles of twisted orange and black. Black smoke boiled up toward the moon in clouds whose bellying undersides were flame-lit and peppered with flying sparks.

  The Forest Service would be sure to sight it or get a report of it. They were probably on their way now. I might as well relax until help arrived.

  It arrived sooner than I expected. A single pair of headlights fanned up the winding road, turned in at the gate without pausing. I got up onto my feet and stumbled into the middle of the driveway.

  The headlights stopped a few feet short of me. Behind them I recognized the bulky shape of an ambulance. Whitey and his partner Ronny climbed out on opposite sides of the cab and converged on me.

  “You got here fast, boys.”

  “That’s our job.” Whitey looked me over in the glare of the headlights. “What happened to you, Mr. Gunnarson?”

  “I have a shoulder wound that needs attention. But you better look after the woman first.”

  “What woman?”

  “Over here,” Ronny said from the side of the road. His voice was vaguely familiar, though I didn’t remember hearing him speak before. He switched on a flashlight and examined her, turning up her eyelids, sniffing her breath.

  “She may be under drugs,” I said.

  “Yeah. It could be an overdose of morphine, or heroin. There’s needle marks on her arm.” He indicated several dark pinpoints in the white flesh of her upper arm.

  “She was talking and acting as though she was high on something.”

  “Whatever it is, she’s mighty low on it now.”

  “You mean she talked to you?” Whitey said. “What did she say?” There were dancing orange gleams in the centers of his eyes, as if he was burning up with curiosity.

  “She said a lot of things. They’ll keep. Let’s get a temporary dressing on this shoulder.”

  He answered slowly. “I guess we better do that. Ronny, leave the pig lay for now. I may need your help with Mr. Gunnarson.”

  The hinges of my knees were as loose as water. I barely made it to the ambulance. They hoisted me up into the back, turned on the roof light, and let me down gently on a padded stretcher. As soon as I was horizontal, my head began to swim and my eyes played tricks. Whitey and Ronny seemed to hover over me like a pair of mad scientists exchanging sinister smiles.

  “Strap his wrists,” Whitey said.

  “That won’t be necessary, I won’t fight you.”

  “We won’t take any chances. Strap his wrists, Ronny.”

  Ronny strapped my wrists to the cold aluminum sides of the stretcher. Whitey produced a triangular black rubber mask attached to a narrow black tube.

  “I don’t need anesthetic.”

  “Yes you do. I hate to see people suffer, you know how I am.”

  Ronny snickered. “I know. Nobody else knows, but I know.”

  Whitey shushed him. He fitted the soft rubber mask over my nose and mouth. Its elastic strap circled my head.

  “Pleasant dreams,” he said. “Breathe out and then breathe in.”

  A sense of survival deeper than consciousness made me hold my breath. Behind my eyes, broken black pieces were falling into place. I had heard Ronny’s snicker on the telephone.

  “Breathe out. Then breathe in.”

  Whitey’s face hung over me like one of the changing faces you see between sleeping and waking at the end of a bad day. I raised my head against the downward pressure of his hand. The end of the black tube was wrapped around his other hand. Using both hands, he forced my head back down.

  “Listen,” Ronny said. “There’s a car coming up the hill.” After a listening silence: “It sounds like a Mercury Special.”

  “Cop car?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You should have been monitoring the police calls. You goofed, man.”

  “You said you needed me in here.”

  “I don’t any more. I can handle him.”

  “How’s the patient doing?”

  “He’ll be gone in a minute. Get out there and give them a story. We pulled him out of the fire, but he died of asphyxiation, poor fellow.”

  He leaned hard on the mask. I was far from gone. One of my sports was diving without a lung.

  Ronny leaned over to look at me. I doubled up my right leg and kicked him in the middle of his face. It felt like stepping on a snail.

  Whitey said: “You devil!”

  I tried to kick him. He was beyond the reach of my flailing legs, bending over my face with his full weight on me. The dark wheel of unconsciousness started to spin in my head. I tried to breathe. There was nothing to breathe.

  The sound of a motor whining up the grade detached itself from the whirring of the dark wheel. Before the two sounds merged again, headlights filled the ambulance with light. The pressure was removed from my face. I caught a blurred glimpse of Whitey standing over his prostrate partner with a black automatic in his hand.

  He fired it. The ambulance interior multiplied its roar like an echo chamber. The single sharp crack that followed was more than an echo. Whitey bowed like a performer at the footlights, clasping his abdomen.

  Pike Granada came into the ambulance and took the rubber thing off me before I followed Broadman and Secundina all the way into darkness.

  chapter 26

  SPOTLIT ON A BLACK, jagged landscape, Sally was being carried away by a gorilla who was wooing her in Spanish. I caught them and tore off the gorilla suit. Then I was wrestling with a man whose name I couldn’t remember. I opened my eyes and saw Lieutenant Wills scowling at me through bars.

  “You can’t keep me in jail,” I think I said. “Judge Bennett will give me a writ of habeas corpus.”

  Wills grinned at me balefully. “It will take more than that to spring you out of this.”

  I sat up swearing. My head took off from my shoulders and flew around the big dim room, bumping into empty beds. It looked more like a dormitory than a jail.

  “Take it easy, now.” Wills leaned on the barred side that turned my bed into a sort of cage. Grasping my good shoulder, he pressed me back onto the pillowless sheet. “You’re in the recovery room in the hospital. You just got out of the operating room.”

  “Where’s Sally? What happened to Sally?”

  “Nothing happened to her, except in the course of nature. She gave birth to a little girl last night. Six pounds ten ounces. The two of them are right here in this same hospital, down on the third floor. Both doing well.”

  “Is that where she went last night?”

  “This is where she went. What bothers me is where you went, and why. What were you doing up in the mountains there?”

  “Hunting deer by moonlight out of season. Arrest me, officer.”

  Wills shook his head curtly. “Get off the pentothal jag. This is serious, Bill. You ought to know how serious. Pike Granada says you were within seconds of getting smothered to death. It he hadn’t been keeping an eye on those ambulance drivers, you would have been a goner.”

  “Thank Granada for me.”

  “I’ll do that, with pleasure. You owe him personal thanks, though, and maybe an apology, eh? Just for good measure, he gave you a pint of his own blood this morning.”

  “Why would Granada do that?”

  “He happens to be your blood type, and the bank was out of your type and you needed it. You needed it in more ways than one, maybe. You could do with a little Spanish blood in your veins. And a little cop blood.”

  “Rub it in.”

  “I don’t mean to do that. But you gave me a bad ten minutes yesterday, until I had a chance to talk to Pike. You know what you are, don’t you? Prejudiced.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “Prejudiced,” Wills repeated. “You may not realize it, but you don’t like cops, and you don’t like Spanish people. If you want to practice law in this town, do it effect
ively, you’re going to have to get to know la Raza, understand ’em.”

  “What does la Raza mean?”

  “The Spanish-American people. They call themselves that. It’s a proud word, and they’re a proud people. You don’t want to undersell them, Bill. They have a lot of ignorance, a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. But they make their contribution to this town. Look at Granada. He came up out of the gangs, sure, but you don’t judge a man by what he did in his crazy teens. You judge him by his contribution over the long hike.”

  “I get the message.”

  “Good. I thought I’d get my oar in while you were still feeling no pain. You were pretty hot against Granada.”

  “I was half convinced that he killed Broadman.”

  “Yeah. We all know different now, thanks to Granada. He figured out for himself that Whitey Slater and his partner Ronald Spice were the guilty ones. I didn’t buy it myself at first, so Granada followed through on his own time. After Doc Simeon told him Mrs. Donato was killed the same way Broadman was, he stuck to Spice and Slater like a leech.”

  “Why didn’t he arrest them?”

  “Premature. He wanted them to take him to their leader.”

  “Have you caught Gaines?”

  “Not yet.” Wills sat down solidly, and crossed his legs. “I was hoping for some help from you on that, and other matters.”

  “I don’t want to be inhospital-inhospitable,” I said. “But I happen to have a wife and a new baby that I’m eager to see.”

  “Forget them for now. You’d never make it down to the third floor anyway. And I have some things I want to ask you about. There’s been a lot of talk about a kidnapping. Was there a kidnapping?”

  “Technically, yes. Gaines kidnapped me in Mountain Grove last night. He took me to the mountain lodge where Granada found me. Gaines and I had a fight there, which he more or less won.”

  “He shot you?”

  “I was shot, yes, and out for a while. He set fire to the house, probably by smashing a gasoline lantern, and left me to burn.”